Flunking the smell test
No, the title does not refer to the cinnamon applesauce pecan coffee cake I made this morning (which, incidentally, passed both smell and taste tests with flying colors).
Rather, I refer to this item about the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, who's being tried in connection with the 9/11 hijackings.
Maybe I'm just paranoid, or have been too immersed in Soviet history for the past four months, but to me this story has chilling echoes of something straight out of Stalin's purges in the mid-thirties: The defendant enters a guilty plea yet still faces the death penalty. He makes a "rambling discourse" of a confession that implicates several other named and unnamed collaborators in attempts to target the highest government officials - "I am guilty of a broad conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction to destroy the White House." Close links are alleged to the foreign mastermind and public enemy No. 1 Osama bin Laden. The highest-ranking law enforcement official in the land pushes for the severest penalty possible with no evident regard for due process.
Now substitute "Stalin" for "Bush," "Kremlin" for "White House," "Trotsky" for "bin Laden" and "Alexei Vyshinsky" for "Alberto Gonzales" and the parallels are much more haunting.
Of course, despite all the similarities this case bears to, say the trial of the "Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Center" in 1936, the story would still be fairly disturbing just for the comments of the presiding judge, Leonie Brinkema, complimenting Moussaoui on his sophisticated knowledge of U.S. law:
[Moussaoui] is extremely intelligent with a better understanding of our legal system than some of the lawyers who have appeared in court.
Ouch.
Rather, I refer to this item about the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, who's being tried in connection with the 9/11 hijackings.
Maybe I'm just paranoid, or have been too immersed in Soviet history for the past four months, but to me this story has chilling echoes of something straight out of Stalin's purges in the mid-thirties: The defendant enters a guilty plea yet still faces the death penalty. He makes a "rambling discourse" of a confession that implicates several other named and unnamed collaborators in attempts to target the highest government officials - "I am guilty of a broad conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction to destroy the White House." Close links are alleged to the foreign mastermind and public enemy No. 1 Osama bin Laden. The highest-ranking law enforcement official in the land pushes for the severest penalty possible with no evident regard for due process.
Now substitute "Stalin" for "Bush," "Kremlin" for "White House," "Trotsky" for "bin Laden" and "Alexei Vyshinsky" for "Alberto Gonzales" and the parallels are much more haunting.
Of course, despite all the similarities this case bears to, say the trial of the "Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Center" in 1936, the story would still be fairly disturbing just for the comments of the presiding judge, Leonie Brinkema, complimenting Moussaoui on his sophisticated knowledge of U.S. law:
[Moussaoui] is extremely intelligent with a better understanding of our legal system than some of the lawyers who have appeared in court.
Ouch.
posted by Alexander Dubcek | 11:17
1 Comments:
Yeah, if the correct understanding of the legal system is something along the lines of "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here."
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